Industrial settings such as hospitals, construction sites, retail centers, etc. can be chaotic environments. A hospital is used herein as an example of an industrial setting. A hospital stay, for even straight-forward care, involves hundreds of healthcare resources. Healthcare resources include people (e.g., doctors, nurses, staff, etc.), processes and assets. The effectiveness of a healthcare system can be determined by the interaction between the healthcare resources. Adverse events that occur in hospitals, such as hospital-acquired infections, lost or missing assets, etc., result in patient harm, increased recovery time, loss of a hospital's and its staff's capacity to serve, unreimbursed healthcare costs, and, generally, increased healthcare costs. One of the main causes of these events is non-adherence to protocols. Protocols can refer to a series of preferred or prescribed tasks that (1) have been proven to reduce adverse events and (2) effect a desired elimination of activities, practices, or patterns that create harm or inefficiency. Example uses of such protocols are for hand washing, fall prevent, rounding, pain management, sleep improvement and physical therapy.
As an illustrative example, despite widespread knowledge that proper hand washing reduces pathogen transmission, adherence by visitors of patients under an infection control protocol and even hospital staff can remain low with mean baseline rates of routine compliance across organizations ranging from approximately 5%-81%, with an overall compliance of approximately 40%. While there are many reasons for non-compliance (including a perceived lack of risk, time to wash, missing knowledge of protocol, or associated discomfort from complying with protocol and general inconvenience) improvement in hand sanitization before coming in contact with patients and often upon completing contact, will reduce the spread of bacteria and thus lower the incidence of adverse events, thereby improving the standard of care. It is therefore advantageous to help the providers of healthcare and other persons involved in a patient's care or visitation to comply with protocols.
Real-time location systems (RTLS) monitor asset distribution and usage, providing actionable information to help control costs and improve the quality and efficiency of care. Systems that have been developed to track and analyze activities in clinical settings have included installing Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) or infrared (IR) reader infrastructures into buildings to capture position information. RFID sensors may be placed on the people and/or assets that need to be tracked.
In non-healthcare domains, such as commercial shopping monitoring, humans in effect become the sensors with such programs as “secret shoppers” and behavioral studies that use shopping patterns to infer consumer propensities to select product preferentially.
However, this is an expensive and time-consuming solution because it requires pulling power and data cabling to all the required locations. Location accuracy can also vary depending on technology. Typical RFID systems have a tolerance of approximately plus-or-minus ten feet, further limiting their range. RFID and IR-based sensors, though, are highly susceptible to drift due to interference in the environment (e.g., a patient room) and cross talk between locations that are physically separated, but have a line of sight between them (e.g., two patient rooms across the hall from each other).
Therefore, it would be desirable to design a system and method for tracking locations and interactions between people and assets in an environment with minimal infrastructure requirements and standardized technologies.